All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Joshua Freeman.
He teaches history at Queens college and at the graduate center of the city university of New York.
And, uh, he's the author of a book, a forthcoming book, American empire, the final volume of the penguin history of the United States.
That's interesting.
Among the books he has authored working class, New York life and labor since world war two and in transit, the transport workers union in New York city, 33 through 66.
He has this piece at a Tom dispatch, uh, co-written with a guy named Steve Fraser.
And it's called creating a prison corporate complex.
And, um, you know how Tom Englehart does it.
He's got his intro at the top and then another title, the rest of the essay locking down an American workforce.
Uh, by Steve Fraser and Joshua B.
Freeman again, Tom dispatch.com for that.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Joshua?
Good, good.
Nice to speak to you.
Uh, well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Very interesting article, a lot of history here about the kind of, um, rise and fall and rise again of American private prison labor.
And in fact, uh, I forgot, but I wanted to start with this and then I just remembered it.
So let's see, here it is.
Um, the 13th amendment to the United States constitution, uh, after the civil war, uh, it reads neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section two, Congress shall have the power, of course, to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
So what it's saying there is private slavery is abolished, but state, uh, AKA, uh, so-called public slavery is still okay, as long as you can get a judge and a prosecutor and a jury to conspire, to deprive somebody of their liberty, then it's on.
And that's really the story that you tell is really about, um, the time immediately after this, uh, in American history, uh, after the civil war.
Um, how, I guess, I don't know if anybody even bothered referring to this loophole in the 13th amendment that, um, even really private slavery is legalized, as long as you kind of launder it through a state prison or even a contract, at least state prison.
Um, it's a really an incredible thing.
Can you talk about maybe the rise of, uh, you say it was a Yankee project, I guess, maybe it's a good place to start after, uh, the civil war.
Yeah.
No, you, you, you gave a wonderful summary of it.
And in fact, uh, I think very few people do realize that the 13th amendment says this, you know, that people think of it, if they know of it at all as the amendment that finally ended slavery, uh, but it does have this loophole about involuntary servitude as punishment because there already existed that system prior to the civil war.
And one of the things that, you know, we, uh, pointed out here, uh, which I think is not something that most people would realize is that this is, was really the case more in the North than in the South, you know, in the South prior to the civil war, uh, where a huge part of the working population was enslaved, you know, slaves were not sent to prison, you know, they were punished by their masters, except under very unusual circumstances.
So, uh, it was really in the North that the modern penal system developed as, you know, serving many functions, including as a kind of control system for workers and where you develop the system of, uh, forcing workers, uh, I'm sorry, forcing prisoners to work in some cases for the government itself, making products that we use in the prison.
Sometimes they even built the prisons, uh, but also being leased out to private corporations.
So when civil war ends, you know, and, and the politics lead to the end of slavery, um, this, as you call the loophole was put in there because it's to protect this preexisting system that had developed in the North, uh, that.
In effect, enslaved, uh, uh, for fixed terms, uh, prisoners and made them work sometimes to the state, but sometimes contracted out to private employers.
So it was a kind of system, if you want to call it of, of, of, of government sanctioned or government clean, cleansed or government mediated slavery, you know, uh, involuntary servitude, uh, after the civil war, this system already in place then becomes national, meaning it spreads to the South.
And I think that's what most people think of, you know, when they think of, uh, uh, workers who are prisoners being forced to do hard labor.
Um, I think the image a lot of people have is the, you know, the chain gang, but that really is not the main story in the 19th century.
The main story is the use of these prisoners, uh, to be leased out to private companies, sometimes inside the walls of the prison itself, and sometimes, uh, offsite, you know, and, and particularly in the South, it tended to be more offsite than North.
It tended to be more inside the prison, but in both cases, this is something that for anyone except a prisoner would be illegal, it's involuntary servitude.
It's forced work.
It's using the power of the state to extract labor value from, from this particular piece of the workforce, the piece inside prison.
So that's the basic story we try to tell.
We, you know, we go into some detail about it and how it plays out and, and some examples, uh, which are pretty fascinating and often pretty horrifying.
Also, uh, it was an unbelievably brutal system.
Uh, one that was, you know, uh, largely out of view, but, uh, certainly was not unknown, uh, during this period of time.
Um, I live in, uh, the very Northern tip of Manhattan and actually just across the river from where I am at the bottom of the Bronx, uh, was one of the examples we used, there was an iron, uh, factory there, uh, it's called the Johnson Iron Works and they had a strike shortly after the civil war.
And, uh, the company, uh, set up a new operation inside Sing Sing prison, which is, you know, not actually all that far up the Hudson river, uh, and use this new operation where they can make the products they'd been making with, uh, pre-labor, you know, uh, now using prison labor to break a strike.
So, you know, you know, this is very directly used as a labor control anti-union mechanism, uh, as well as a way for, uh, the government to punish workers and make money, you know, uh, generate income.
It's, it's an income generator for, for the government.
So it's, it's quite a story.
It's not a, uh, proud aspect in my view of our national history.
Uh, but it, it certainly was not a peripheral institution.
Well, now in the article, you do kind of portray a situation where I guess it got so bad after, you know, the last, uh, 25, 30 years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, that then there really was kind of a reform.
Because of course, all the incentives, I think you talk about in the article where you just have outright criminal conspiracies by the lawmakers, the law enforcers, the judges, and the people leasing out the labor, it's a lot easier to talk about these things when we're talking about a hundred years ago too, isn't it?
Uh, and it got so bad, you know, people's feelings are a little bit less defensive about, you know, whether they need to take responsibility for something like this in the present, I guess.
Uh, but anyway, um, uh, you say though that this kind of went away for a little while, maybe this was part of the new deal that they actually had, uh, some, uh, reformation of this.
And then, cause I think, you know, I grew up with the idea that if you're forced to do prison labor, it's growing the food eaten at the prison by the prisoners, or maybe making license plates, which is, you know, a, a state government monopoly product, that kind of thing.
But, um, we're back again now, of course, is the subtext to all this.
And we'll cover this more on the other side of the break, but we're back again in a situation where prisoners are doing every kind of labor, but for pennies on the dollar.
Right.
Well, let me, you, you, you got an eye out there.
So let me talk about a little bit of it.
Um, you're absolutely right.
I think one of the things, and you only got like one minute for the I'm sorry.
Uh, you know, uh, certainly the labor movement was one factor because it just like the kind of situations I was describing, uh, that, that really denounced prison labor because they saw it, uh, as undermining the liberty of non-imprisoned workers, you know, by, uh, creating this, uh, downward pressure that, you know, people in 19th century talked about wage slavery, you know, that's not prison slavery, that's free labor, you know, and they saw this pushing them in the direction.
So they were part of a movement that eventually by the early decades of the 20th century led to not the total elimination, but, but by and large.
All right.
Now hold it right there.
It's Joshua B Freeman.
He's got this piece of Tom dispatch.com locking down an American workforce, the whole history and current day too.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Joshua B Freeman.
He's got this great piece with a guy named Steve Fraser.
Also is a coauthor here at, uh, Tom dispatch.com locking down an American workforce prison labor as the past and future of American quote unquote, free market capitalism, a good quote on quotes there.
Uh, there should be a quote on quotes around privatization too.
Um, when it's really kind of only half privatization in the worst way where you have all the coercion of the public authority, uh, mixed with all the private pri profit incentives, as it says, right in the introduction, uh, one of these companies got a contract for prison and the state had a promise that we'll keep it 90% full at all times as a condition.
Well, what if Americans just stopped committing crimes?
Then what we just do round up some fighting age males anyway, or what?
But anyway, so that's what we're talking about here.
And I'm sorry, cause I asked you a big load of question right before the break, um, all about kind of the rise and fall, and you were saying that, uh, labor, uh, pushed, uh, you know, organized and push against, uh, you know, comp having to compete with these indentured slaves basically in the prison systems, uh, back, I guess, in the thirties and reformed this for a while, and now we're back to it.
Yeah.
I'll let you go.
I didn't want to give the impression that we're the only critics.
There were kind of middle-class reform groups in the South.
There were both white and black populists who were opposed to this.
So there was a growing revulsion of the way in which the state power was being used to exploit, uh, American citizens on behalf of these private interests.
And the pressure grew and, uh, you sort of gradually saw the, uh, diminution and eventually the near elimination by the 1930s of this kind of private leasing or private use of prisoners, uh, for forced labor.
Um, so I think, you know, uh, there was, as you said, the rise, the fall, uh, today, of course, we're seeing a lot of different things going on in the prison.
Uh, complex, you know, uh, the big story, of course, is just a massive increase in the number of prisons.
25% of all prisoners in the world are now in the United States.
We have over 2 million prisoners.
It's a extraordinary, uh, rate of incarceration.
Uh, certain communities, particularly African-Americans in some parts of the country, Latinos are being decimated by the imprisonment of so many of the members of those communities.
And as part of that, we've seen, uh, a couple of things happening.
One is the general revival of prison labor.
Now, as you pointed out, a lot of that is working for the government.
You know, in my university, you know, when we hand out blue books that the kids take exams in, uh, most people, the professors and the students don't realize those blue books are made in prison, you know, by prisoners for New York state, the furniture and a lot of our university offices is made in New York state prison.
So, uh, there's a lot of that going on, but there's also a private component, uh, which is privatizing the prisons themselves, you know, and there's, of course, been a huge wave of this where, uh, private companies like, you know, correctional corporation of America and Wackenhut and these kinds of companies build or lease prisons, run them as for-profit operations for the states.
They do it for the, uh, for ICE.
They do it for, uh, municipalities.
And then we began to see the return of the private exploitation of prison labor.
And, uh, that's, you know, kind of the connection we were making.
It's still, uh, not on the scale it once was, or it's not on the scale of the public use of prisoners, but the return of this phenomenon, you know, we think is, is, is pretty disturbing.
Uh, and there is a growing movement against it, which I think kind of inspired us to point out the history of this.
And to show, first of all, that it was once a big part of American life, but also that, you know, people did roll this thing back, that you can intervene and fight this, uh, which, you know, we think would be an appropriate thing to do.
Right.
Now you're not necessarily saying that, um, you know, being forced to build furniture is any better than being forced to work for AT&T or for, uh, some other private corporation, right?
The point is just that the incentives for perpetuating the thing and having it get worse and worse are vastly increased when you have all these outside powers in on the game.
Yeah, that's, I'm glad you brought that up.
No, I wasn't trying to say that.
Um, you know, you could argue, I guess, theoretically, whether it might be a better thing to have people learn skills and do work in prison and sit around, you know, mind killing, uh, boredom, but the conditions under which the public employment happens tend to be pretty miserable too.
You know, it would be one thing if you were paying prisoners the minimum wage and treating them the way we treat other workers.
That's not what's happening.
Even if they're working for the government itself or for the prison system itself.
So that is a system full of abuses.
We were focusing more on the emerging use by the private sector and hooking that back to the history.
But, but you're, you know, you're absolutely right that, uh, the involuntary servitude used as punishment, uh, is, uh, problematic if it's being directly done by the government or in effect kind of subcontracted out to these private, uh, corporations.
The other thing I would just want to mention is, you know, this back in the, back in the earlier period was not something just done by kind of fly by the operators, huge national corporations, some of the biggest companies in America use prison labor.
And we're actually seeing some of that today too.
You know, it's not a necessarily small, obscure firms.
Um, some very big companies, airlines, uh, high tech companies have, uh, experimented with using prison labor for everything from call centers to manufacturing.
Um, some of them have had second thoughts, but, uh, this is not something that, you know, is in some deep obscure corner of American life.
You know, this, this, this back in the 19th century.
And again, today, uh, we really dealing with the core of the economy, you know, and, and, and so I think we would, uh, very much hope that movement stops, uh, saying this back to the scale where it was 100, 150 years ago.
Well, now I don't know the numbers, but, uh, you may have saw the headline last week comparing the American penal system to the Soviet gulag and saying, it's really the only thing you could compare it to in terms of numbers.
Not that we necessarily work them as hard as Joe Stalin did.
Uh, but, uh, in terms of numbers, and as you pointed out, 25% of the prisoners in the world are in American prisons.
We only have 5% of the population of the world here at this middle part of North America.
Uh, it's a pretty small jurisdiction to have that many people locked up and it's for all kinds of things that, uh, people would really be amazed probably to find out people are doing time for right now.
It's not just the drug war.
It's the, you know, there are a list of offenses, the, what do they say?
A felony a day.
Everybody commits a federal felony a day without even knowing it.
Right?
No, we were an outlier.
And you know why that is complicated question.
I'm not sure I'd be all the answers, but if you look at like advanced capitalist countries were like off the chart, you know, there's nothing vaguely similar to us in terms of the percentage of our population that's put in jail.
Uh, there's certainly a racial dimension to it.
And I think we shouldn't, uh, uh, overlook that, you know, uh, this phenomena develops in the wake of the civil rights movement and the movement for greater rights for African Americans.
Uh, it developed in a period of high crime, you know, so there's a lot of public concern.
Uh, but I think also a kind of general social meanness, I don't know how to put it, you know, uh, that seemed to have come, it's it's our solution rather than guaranteeing everyone a job or, or dealing through public or private means with the great needs of much of our population.
We just stick them in jail, you know, for, uh, as you say, things that many of us don't even realize are crimes or often petty crimes.
And of course that was true in the 19th century too.
We point out in the article that, uh, crimes like stealing a pig or a fence rail were often punished with, you know, many years in jail.
And of course those years in jail meant being sent out as a, uh, least, uh, convict to a private company.
So, uh, we live in a society in which incarceration is really part of the everyday way it, we manage our lives.
And I think we went really off the tracks at some point, you know, it's funny.
The neocons are always talking about this national greatness that they, we all need a project to all work together on like a war, of course, from their point of view, always a war.
But how about, uh, completely tearing down and revamping our criminal justice system in America, reinstating the bill of rights rather than letting them scrap more of it and see if maybe we can work on perfecting our own society a little bit.
Think of what a great beacon of Liberty we could be to the rest of the world.
If we were even approaching having our act together.
Yeah.
Well, I don't think we're any close.
You know, we're like the light at the end of the train, not the beacon at the front of it on this one.
And I have to say that, uh, you know, conservatives play a big role in the story, but so do liberals in many cases.
And I think the lack of courage by many people who should know better in, in, in letting this pandering, you know, frankly, being afraid to say the obvious truth, you know, about how it is that so many, you know, particularly younger people end up in jail, you know, for, for minor offenses, they get caught in this system.
They never escaped its clutches that, you know, even if they get out of jail, they can't get jobs because of their, their prison record.
They're they're marked as, as troublemakers they're harassed.
Um, it's, it's really a nightmare system that so many Americans now live, you know, in its clutches, whether they're inside prison or, uh, on probation or, or in one way or another, they're the children of people caught up in this system, the relatives of them.
It's such a cancerous force in our society.
And I think we really do need to step up and just begin to address this.
That's Joshua B Freeman.
Everybody check him out at Tom dispatch.com, locking down an American workforce.
Thanks very much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Oh, no.
Great.
It was a nice conversation.
Thanks a lot.
